JEWISH WORD: FLASH POINT IN THE CULTURE WARS
Nadine Epstein, MOMENT MAGAZINE
From conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to author Christopher Hitchens, many consider the central struggle of our time to be one between secular forces and the faithful over the role of religion in America.
“Secular” is a fightin’ word in America’s culture wars. From conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Lapin, author of America’s Real War, many consider the central struggle of our time to be one between secular forces and the faithful over the role of religion in America. On the opposite side of the battlefield stand such outspoken critics of religion as author Christopher Hitchens and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
The word “secular” and its many permutations are widely used and abused, in part due to a semantic confusion. “Secular has two main meanings in today’s society,” says Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor and author of Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It. “One applies to institutions or public space. You can be a legal separatist and a deeply religious person and believe that the public sphere should not be infused with religion. The other one is defined as an individual’s set of beliefs.” The latter definition, applied as a derisive synonym for “atheist,” has become particularly ubiquitous.
For the early Christians, seculum, the Latin word from which secular is derived, simply differentiated between institutions of government and the province of spirituality, dividing the temporal from the eternal realm. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” Jesus is said to have uttered in response to a question about whether it was lawful for Jews to pay taxes to the Romans.
Historically, the word seculum was a way of counting time in Rome, not in the City of God. The root means “of an era,” says Azzan Yadin, a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University. Two Romance language derivatives that denote the passage of time live on: the Spanish siglo and the French siecle, both of which mean “century.”
George Jacob Holyoake, the 19th century leader of the British free thought movement, coined the English word “secularism” based on the Latin root. For him, secularism was “a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life.” Although this definition did not necessarily imply opposition to religion, Holyoake was an atheist who once asked “whether we are not too poor to have a God” and who was the last person to be tried (and imprisoned) for blasphemy in England.
Holyoake was deeply influenced by Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community for his unorthodox interpretation of the Torah and his naturalistic conception of God. An inspiration for the free thought movement, Spinoza’s ideas also spread to the American colonies, where the “founding fathers” would establish, for the first time, a nation without the word “god” in its constitution.
After centuries of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, many Jews were delighted to embrace secular thinking. “The idea of political emancipation in European nationalism and Enlightenment thought came tied with a universal idea of citizenship that was distinct from anyone’s religious affiliation,” says Yadin. “The emergence of Jewish secularism became synonymous with universalism.”
In the U.S., secularism gave birth to Jewish institutions like B’nai B’rith, which, when founded in 1843, was notable for its focus not on religion but on the unity of Jews. Later, organizations promoting “secular Judaism” as a way of thought arrived on the scene. Among the most influential today are the Society for Humanistic Judaism, founded in 1963 by the late Rabbi Sherwin Wine, and the Center for Cultural Judaism, established in 2003 by philanthropist Felix Posen to support the study of secular Jewish history and cultures around the world. Today, countless other Jewish groups have coalesced around Jewish culture, ethics and social action rather than belief in God. The idea that one can be secular and proudly Jewish is flourishing, says Yadin. “This is something that has entailed a whole new configuration of what Judaism is.”
“People since the 19th century have said ‘I am a secular Jew’ to mean ‘I am a Jew, but I am not a religiously observant Jew,’” says Susan Jacoby, author of the 2008 The Age of American Unreason who runs The Secularist’s Corner on The Washington Post website. In contrast, “you never hear someone say ‘I am a secular Christian.’”
Nor does one hear the phrase “I am a secular Muslim,” says Ira Lapidus, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and author of A History of Islamic Societies. “Islam doesn’t have separation between religion and state or the intellectual basis on which to build this reform other than the governments that exist today.” Secular Muslims are more likely to be referred to as modernists or liberal Muslims.
Secular Judaism has left a mark on Israel, which was founded by Zionist Jews from Europe who considered religion to be medieval. As a result, the new country needed a word for secular. The task fell to Josef Klausner, the uncle of the novelist Amos Oz and one of the first professors of modern Hebrew, who taught at Hebrew University.
Klausner, says Yadin, coined the Hebrew word hiloni, based on the Aramaic word hilonai. Hilonai is a translation of the biblical Hebrew word zar, which means lay or non-priestly and denotes the separation between outside and inside the temple.
During Israel’s early decades, hiloni had a positive connotation but that has changed. “Today in Israel, you are either Orthodox or nothing,” says Feldman. “Hiloni refers to a person and is usually used in opposition to the word dati, which means religious. It’s now an insult, leading some Israelis to prefer hofshi, which literally means ‘free.’”
In the United States, debate swirls around how to defuse “secular’s” ideological charge. “The word is too hot,” says Yadin, who compares it to the word feminism: Many who espouse feminist ideals, he says, are uncomfortable using the term to describe themselves.
One way to neutralize “secular,” argues Susan Jacoby, is not to mix up the word’s two meanings. She fears that using the word to mean “atheist” confuses, even harms American political discourse. “To call our Constitution ‘atheist’ rather than ‘secular’ turns it into something else,” she says. “Our Constitution is secular because it ascribes no governmental powers to God.” It’s important to make clear that this usage has nothing to do with a lack of belief in God. “A better phrase to use if you are non-believer is,” she suggests, would be “‘I am an atheist or agnostic.’”
This article appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of Moment Magazine. It is reprinted here with the permission of the writer.
|
|